Living
by Otto's Goat
Summary: Fluffy fluff on Eowyn and Faramir. Drabbles and things.
1. Earth

_Collection of drabbles and one-shots on Faramir and Éowyn, in no order._

_--_

_-_

She kneels before the hole, and peers into the earthly darkness. The warm, insipid air of summer penetrates her thin gown, and she breathes in the scent of earth and light; death and life. She watches him lower the sapling into the opening, and her gaze comes to rest upon his hands.

His love of trees perplexes her; she is a child of the plains.

There is much she does not know about him; much she will never know. But she strains at the windows of her mind; she tries to understand his thoughts and the frown that oft slips from his face. It is hard though, to know a man who does not speak with words.

Resting next to him at night, listening to the wind howling through the trees, she burrows in beside him, finding warmth in his presence. But he does not move to hold her close. He understands her fear, and cleaves not to her. There is a veil between them, and he wills her to tear it down.

He does not touch it.

So she watches him as he closes his eyes over the tender tree; she sees gentleness in his movements.

... Reverence.

She rests her head upon his shoulder, and closes her eyes as well. He grows still, does not move.

And then he lies a hand; darkened with sod, the nails short and uneven, upon her cheek. She breathes in the scent of earth.

His lips find hers beneath the sapling that trembles and strains in the faint summer wind.

---


	2. Contentment

They sit in silence before the fire; she busies herself with needlework, he counts the flakes of snow that settle on the window's ledge.

They do not speak.

There is an air of contentment within the walls of the room, and the sound of the fire's breath lights upon their thoughts as an echo.

In her hands she holds a span of pale wool; white as snow it is.

It melts into the dusky recesses of her gown and gently stains the dark linen. She plucks at it distractedly, and looks up to meet his gaze. But he still looks beyond the room and out into the open; out into the blowing chill of winter.

Her eyes follow his, and fall upon the falling snow that taps against the frozen glass. He smiles at some distant memory, and she grows still as she watches the smile flicker upon his face.

---A smile that fades as quickly as the traces of light upon his brow.

"It is cold," she whispers suddenly, and tugs her mantle tightly about her strong shoulders.

It takes him a long while to take heed of her, and when he does, she notes that his mind is elsewhere. He draws close to her, and fingers the material that rests upon her lap.

"This wool is soft. It will keep the babe warm," he murmurs, his eyes resting for a brief moment upon her swollen belly. "You have no need to fear the cold."

But she fears not the snow, nor the moaning winds that grip their home. She fears a coldness that can still two beating hearts; make the warmth between two loved ones seem brittle and harsh.

He sits himself down at her feet, and rests his dark head against the folds of her gown. He watches the flames in the hearth, and speaks no more.

She realizes then, that he is content to sit so beside her.

... And her fear fades into the dark night as do the slivers of snow that grace winter's firm breath.

---


	3. Hunger

---

Following the trail of crumbs with a smile, he finds the child crouching beneath the winding stair.

They look at one another, and he feigns displeasure, folding his arms behind his back. Straight he stands, as tall as the columns that grapple with the canopy of sky that hangs overhead.

Sun and wind mingle and sweep through the hall, touching the locks of their hair: his dark, the child's fair.

There is jam across Elboron's face, and his small greedy hands clutch a pastry.

"I was hungry," the child whispers.

He smiles and plants himself down beside his son, gathering him up into arms that were meant (were born, she tells him at times) to cradle and lull.

"I am hungry too," he tells him, and the child breaks the pie neatly in half and gives it to him.

Nibbling on the day-old tart, he suddenly remembers himself a child like the one before him: beneath such a stair, but in a different city, hoarding instead a pocketful of ripened berries.

"I was hungry," he told his father, trying to find justification in the man's gaze. But all for naught, for punishment was given swiftly and without penance.

He still remembers the gleam in his father's eyes; the gray-glass flicker of steel that veiled nothing; no one.

Staring down at his son's flaxen head, he closes his eyes.

He finds he is still hungry; he fears he always will be.

---


	4. Homage

_Drabble, mind you.  
... I've always enjoyed the episode in the Houses of Healing when Éowyn requests a window that faces East. Only, however, because it reminded me of Faramir turning to the West before supping. Juxtapose those two separate incidents, and you get a sense of just how different, and yet similar, these two really were. Ah, well..._

_---_

She begins each day; he closes it.

Rising before the sun, she leaves him amidst the linens and stands at the open doors, leaning towards the horizon--- a stretch of warmth that wavers as strands of gossamer.

And he, in turn, bows hoary head when the skies are full with a trembling of colours.

… Eyes closed, he remembers a dream or two; an unknown memory.

Breaking bread at the close of each day, they pay homage: Now to the East, now to the West.

She is his door to the East, and he her window on the West.

---


	5. The knot they've made

---

It's strange, he decides, that he still remembers the woman he called 'mother' as a child, but she cannot.

Tell me what you remember, she tells him, strumming at the folds of his tunic with a detachment that is fierce and tender and almost a dream in itself.

Tell me what you know.

But he does not know anything, no, he does not know much, save what the wind says to him when he stands on yonder hills; what he's learnt from sitting and watching flocks pierce both sky and rain cloud.

-What he's seen on fields of said glory; of men and beast and the colour that blood turns after it has soaked into the ground and mingled with the fruit of the vine.

I remember her hands, he says at last, and he takes up her own fingers within his own. They were very long, and very tight at the folds, and she used them to hold my fear at bay.  
As you do now.

The most important part! He thinks, and she brushes it aside and lights upon what interests her:

Your fear?

She combed my hair with those hands, she kissed me with those fingertips.  
I never felt her lips.

She thinks this through, and stretches alongside him to touch his mouth with her own. Her lips are dry and grate against his own rough chin in the dark, and he closes first one eye, then the other. Darkness has never felt so even; so well spaced out and comfortable.

Did she sing to you?

Yes. He pauses, No; I… don't know.  
Maybe.

She bounds up suddenly, and towers over him on bent knees. Odd, that she seems so far away now, though in truth she is only an arm's length from his upturned face.

Why don't you imagine, she says at last, Why don't you pretend that she did?

She is awake, as he is himself, but her breath is racing quicker then his, and he imagines that sleep lies over in the next room. He listens, but all he can hear is human life.

Because. He says out loud. I am tired.  
I can not.

Why?

He feels as though he has already answered her, so he speaks no more; pulling her back down and holding her close. Silence fills the knot their bodies has made, and her heartbeat skips strangely; he listens to see if maybe it is his own.

Yes, he says at last, breathing into the white expanse of skin that stretches from shoulder to chin, Why don't you pretend?

But now it is her turn to be silent.

---


	6. To read one another

Author's Note: After some research, a certain element of this story may or may not be possible. So please don't yell at me that "Eowyn was not stupid!" : I never said she was.

---

He reads to her at dusk, when there is still light to see by, but not enough to work beneath. Outside, hands are laid to rest and plows and shovels are thrown down as the moon eases in. They usher in the twilight together, and at times she must hold the night at bay, waiting until he has come home with the last of the light clinging to the edges of his windswept cloak.

She listens to him read, and finds she understands him best when his words are not his own; when his voice speaks through the tongues of men long-dead; men forgotten and forlorn. She thinks he knows them better then he knows himself, but she herself is not sure of this thought, and remains quiet, trying to understand the man she's claimed for her own.

"Read to me," he whispers one evening, as the world cries goodbye to the sun. Sore are his eyes; he cannot read the script.

She takes the tome out of his hands, and holds it desperately. His eyes are closed: he waits for her to speak. She watches him, and a feeling of utter unease clings to her shoulders; they droop, first one, then the other, until she is bent over and shrunken to what she used to be and will one day become again.

The volume falls from her quivering grasp, and the sound clings to the walls and floor and nestles into stone and mortar.

In her shame, she turns from him:

She cannot read.

---

He teaches her now, and sits patiently beside her, watching her cheeks grow bright with pride. He resists the urge to crook one finger and trace the droop of her lips, to lift the head and let it fall back down again, if only to see a flicker of balm within her eyes.

She will not have him think that her people are ignorant; she rather be set low in his eyes then have the men and women of the land behind her be debased. She tries to tell him with fluttering fingers and thick, unsure wrists of the call of the grass, and of how it felt to first gallop upon a stead and breathe in the smell of sweat. She recalls both wind and sweeping flame; she's kindling herself alive again.

In telling him, she loses herself, and remembers again what it felt to ride free: what it was like to answer to no man.

He does not acknowledge her words, and as she speaks he spells out onto a clean parchment the few objects about the room: _table, chair, vase, bed_. He listens to her, and imagines her a daughter of the plains and of the fields, flaxen and fair as only the young are wont to be.

He tells himself that _his _daughters will be taught, that both wind and grass will have to wait.

And so they pass the months. It does not draw them close.

---

Shame fills her eyes; shame so threadbare that she thinks he can see the blush upon her heart.

Alone at night, she struggles by candlelight.

She knows not that he is awake, and that he lies in the shadows with eyes closed, straining to hear her as she speaks softly to herself, discovering words with unnatural pauses that guide him off into sleep, only to have him brought back to the present with each slow-strung word that stumbles across her tongue.

She hesitates over a word, and he bites down on lips he's forgotten how to use.

"_Stronghold_," he corrects her, whispering into the warm rug about him. "_Longhorn. Thistledown. Amethyst_."

By morning the volumes have been placed back upon waiting shelves, and he counts them, wondering which one she has now lost herself within.

---

His eyes grow thoughtful as the days pass. He tells her their studies can wait, and asks her to once more walk beside him in the gardens of green. He speaks to her of flowers grown rampant and of the churning of the Anduin and of the speckled rocks beneath the clear waters. He tells her of the moss, grown thick enough now to be a bed:

"For the nannies and the billies," he tells her, "a bed too sweet to only dream upon." His hands she absently pushes away; or maybe not, for she is aware of more then his hands, and she looks away, so close to giving in.

But she is set, and pours over the manuscripts by day and by night, and the seasons change and murmur beyond the windows of their home. The rains come first, then the snow, followed by petals both white and now amber hued. The sun returns last, and pours itself out against the walls, but she's not there to count the rays.

He sees the first snow, and touches the first shoot; but she remains inside, where words and rhetoric encroach the room in which she sits. She's weaving spells now, and she does not need his help.

---

She reads to him at last, but there is no joy for either of them.

He watches the shadows grow and shrink. She listens to her voice turn still and small. And now she wonders what there is left for her to do. He takes her hand into his own, and winds his fingers through hers until the clasp is so tight that she's not sure if their entwined hands are one or two separate selves.

"Come see the iris-bells," he urges.

She finds the sun is bright beyond the stone walls, and she holds a hand to the lining of her face. She's forgotten much, she realizes.

"Tell me of the horses," he says to her in a hidden vale where the branches are limbs and the leaves lady's gloves, "Tell me of the grass beneath your feet once again." But she's still unsure, and she watches him silently. Equal at last, they stand before each other, but there's nothing for her to read now, no words, no thoughts in this green room with walls both close and free--- save his.

"Do you remember the nannies and the billy goats?" He asks softly. She smiles at last.

They discover the meadow together, and she is surprised to find that the earth breathes deeply, even as she does now, with soil and grass beneath her arched back, and that it too can moan.

---


End file.
